Cancer

Breast, cervical, and ovarian cancers lead to global women's health problems. This issue of Health Care for Women International contains seven research articles in which the authors discuss who is at risk, educational needs of practitioners and potential patients, the politics of access to diagnosis and treatments, presence or absence of choices for women, and, perhaps most importantly, the extent to which women control their own bodies.

Researchers explored barriers and facilitators to treatment of women's cancers in four of the articles. In three, researchers employed in depth interviews for data gathering. Australian researchers Britta Wigginton and colleagues explain that while cancer issues for women present global concerns, the prevalence rates for women in developing countries are greater than in more developed countries, placing some women at greater risk than others. The authors chose to interview cancer survivors in in a Zambia, hoping to learn about facilitators and barriers to treatment for women's cancers. Analyzing the interviews, researchers learned that barriers included misconceptions including cancer being a death sentence, shameful, and contagious, yet a strong facilitator is the survivors' motivation to advocate for other women to dispel the myths. Caroline M. Johnson and her research team, while working with women from Andean countries, employed an ecological model to analyze their data in consideration of individual, interpersonal and institutional barriers and facilitators. Heather Story Steiness and colleagues interviewed both women and men in Bangladesh, focusing primarily on socio-cultural barriers. Due to interest in cognitive determinants of cervical cancer screening, Towhid Babazadeh and colleagues conducted a cross-sectional survey of women in Iran. From this study we also may glean knowledge of barriers to cancer screening in a developing country. Scholars from elsewhere on the globe may compare the four articles as there is much that you will find relevant in your home country, especially the need to destigmatize cancer diagnoses, which was found to be a barrier to treatment in all three studies.

You will read the work of Arwa Alsaraireh and Muhammad W. Darawad, who as part of a teaching intervention study, employed self-administered questionnaires to assess Jordanian students' knowledge about breast cancer and breast self-examination (BSE) and the extent to which the students practiced BSE. Michelle S. Williams and colleagues were also involved in an interventional study to improve knowledge of cervical cancer in Ghana. They took a somewhat different approach to assessment, choosing to learn about Ghanaian nurses' knowledge and attitudes toward cervical cancer. It will also be heuristic for scholars to compare these two articles, for while the cancers studied differed, the issues raised by scholars are quite similar.

In the final article Rachel Meadows and colleagues present data from interviews of women who had a family history of ovarian cancer in the United States. The researchers' focus is psychosocial challenges women face before and after deciding to have their ovaries and fallopian tubes removed to avoid ovarian cancer. This study is different from the others. I hope in reading it you will realize that women in countries with more economic resources have access to more options for cancer prevention, but nevertheless are just as worried about the effects of cancer as are women with fewer economic advantages.

As always, read and learn.